Thank you for joining me again this week for the second episode of Architecture, Coffee, & Ink! This week I am excited to be joined by one of my best friends, Racheal Lemire, to discuss Agriculture and the link between architecture and agriculture, how the function changes the design and the set up of the farm, and listen to the advice Racheal gives as someone in the field-especially for young designers who may be tackling designing their first farms. As always, make sure you check you facts, check your sources, and more importantly check me. Since this is a conversation episode, the sources this week are pretty much just myself-as all the music came from me this week, and Racheal Lemire. I hope you enjoy the transcript below!
In addition, this week I will start a few shorter non-podcast entries to the blog, and they will be found exclusively underneath the Blog Archives section. This is to help puzzle through and discuss some more topics. I will warn you, towards the beginning of the episode you can hear a squeaky toy I was unable to edit out from our guest dogs-so please don’t be alarmed. But whether you are just here to read the automated transcript or listen to the podcast, I hope you enjoy!
Episode 2_The Udder Truth about Agriculture
TRANSCRIPT:
00:00:00 Hollywood
Pull up a hay bale and take a seat. It’s time for architecture, coffee, & ink as we dive into our first ever conversation.
30 seconds intro.
Hello, this is Hollywood C and you’re listening to architecture, coffee and ink, a podcast dedicated to introducing the concepts of detailing out the designs and tackling the architecture. You might not realize the meaning behind. I’m your Hostess and I am here today to start introducing you. To the concepts that make you wonder why. So, I ask you to brew your coffee, grab your sketchbook and pen and let’s begin so. Welcome to the second ever episode of Architecture Coffee ending where I am really excited to announce that I am here today with one of my best friends, Rachel Lemire.
So just to introduce Racheal, she has a Bachelor’s in animal and dairy sciences from 2016 and then. She went on to graduate in 2019 with an MS in agriculture and Animal sciences where she focused her research topic on the effects of maternal nutrition and genetic background on myogenic, adipogenic, and fibrogenic miRNA expression in skeletal muscles of Angus and Brahman cattle offspring.
Thank you, Racheal, for coming to join us today.
00:02:13 Racheal
Hi everybody, I’m so glad to be here and to be your first guest.
00:02:19 Hollywood
You are! Thank you so much for joining me because I needed somebody who would forgive me for basically making her record three times now, as we struggle through trying to do this. And so, as everybody can probably guess, we’re probably going to talk about cows today from.
From your research topic and special presentations. So, Rachel has been a great friend of mine.
She’s stuck with me through 10 years-Unfortunately for her, and we have gone through some crazy shenanigans. So, she would be the perfect guest to help me kind of discuss. The difference between,
Like, uh, basically a podcast episode focused on agriculture. Because when I was talking with a professor this week- Unrelated to anything, I was just kind of outlining my thesis and what I was doing and why I thought I was cool enough to start a podcast and the professor was like, well, if you’re going to do a podcast about landscape and architecture, you better talk about. The agriculture industry, because what greater influence of architecture meets landscape is there, then farms and the rural settings and everything like that. And we’re going to go into a little bit more depth, cause that sounded pretty naive, laissez faire attempt at it, but uhm so Rachel before we get started in the topic, the huge in the depth start. What is your background and experience with agriculture (i.e farms) in both your professional and private life?
00:04:03 Racheal
All right, so I’ll just give you just, I guess. A little rundown about me. I actually I didn’t grow up on a farm and you know, but I guess everyone else doesn’t. I kind of grew up in the suburbs or I guess outside the suburbs, but my father was a biologist and my mother worked for the USDA, so I wasn’t very far removed. My mother grew up on a farm her parents ran. During my lifetime anyway, a cow calf operation. So. beef cows. In Kentucky, and we weren’t very close to the farm. But anytime we went to visit, I got to help, feed the cows, or name an orphan baby or help feed you know. Bottle feed babies.
I worked through college. During the summers on the farm, and that’s where I guess I learned my love for agriculture there. Obviously, you said I worked through. Both of my degrees and are in agriculture and then when I got out of grad school I have been working as a reproductive technician. With dairy cows, which pretty much means I make a living breeding cow through artificial insemination. Which is a super fancy way to say I go every day and I make babies. It’s lots of fun. And also, I should probably take this opportunity to warn everybody to hear some weird noises.
00:05:40 Hollywood
Right?
00:05:45 Racheal
I have two dogs, running around the house right now and one of thinks that he should get attention right now.
00:05:55 Hollywood
That’s something we are definitely dropping on the blog, her babies are Allie and Taz, and they’re both of their photos will 100% be on the blog post so everybody else can enjoy them as well as much as I do.
00:05:55 Racheal
Sorry about that.
00:06:11 Hollywood
With the farms you’ve actually worked on, everything from small private farms to large commercial farms, and from that wide scale, many of them have been attempting to produce product for sale.
So how does this influence the setup of the building?
00:06:27 Racheal
Well, so that question I guess has a lot of answers and it starts with what kind of farm you’re looking at.
So the infrastructure you need for a beef farm is usually pretty different from what you would need at a dairy. Uh, so I’ll. Do you mind if I start with My grandparent’s farm?
00:06:53 Hollywood
Go for it.
00:06:55 Racheal
So, they ran 50 cows and calves before my time. That farm was also used to raise-to back up a little bit- corn, some soybeans. So, what we ended up with was a big tool shed with a couple of parking spots in.
It a cowshed that had Um, some troughs paste? To feed the cows, and then a hay Manger. And eventually my papaw added on a little room for calves to eat with like a gate just big enough for them to sit through. We have another barn that also has more troughs in it and a working chute with a head catch that we used for loading them onto the trailer, moving them, sorting, or doctoring. A tobacco barn from when we used tobacco-It’s also acts as a tool storage barn through implements and equipment, and the newest addition is a hay barn so that we can keep all the hay stored under a roof. And every time I turn around, it seems like we’re adding onto that a little bit more every year. But that’s just to make the point that the infrastructure is ever changing. That farm has been there within our family for at least 40 years and we’re always adding something to make it better and make it work for us.
More about the farms I encountered while I’m working. Uhm, tend to be more dairy farms. I come across everything from a a small family homestead with maybe 1 milking cow, so she might have a single stall like you would have for a horse with access to a small paddock. Then you have the next step up would be of a family dairy, usually a traditional tie stall barn. Usually somewhere between 50 and 100 cows that are milking at a time and so those barns you generally find a silo-maybe two or three-For grain and silage storage. And quite a number of those farmers let their cows out during the day in the summertime, and even sometimes at night. So, the barn has to be connected to pasture and the pasture needs to be close by, so the cows can come. You know, you’re not spending 2 hours getting cows in about a pasture every day. They have to plan for their manure storage. You know how to get that in and out of the barn has to be efficient. Their hay storage and equipment storage, I guess to that effect. In barns of that size, sometimes. I’ve called them Dutch Barns, but I’ve heard them called bunk barns or bank barns. They can be built into essentially a bank or a hillside, so the cows would be. On the bottom and what looks to me a lot of times like a walkout basement. And then the floor above that would typically be used for hay storage or equipment storage. And the rafters on those barns, A lot of times will be used for hanging tobacco so it’s a multipurpose building, but it has this fairly small footprint. So, I feel like that’s very efficient.
00:10:56 Hollywood
So vertical farming instead of horizontal farming basically.
00:11:01 Racheal
Right, right? They’re pretty neat everybody. Everybody makes use of them, you know, in the best way for their farm and what they raise. In this in the area I’m working currently, these tend to be generational farms, and so sometimes the barns have been added onto. If you go around and ask most of my farmers, they’re milking more cows than their father was, or their grandfather was, so sometimes you can look at a barn from a road and be like oh, oh, that’s been added onto. [Sometimes] Two or three times because they needed more space for cows or calves or equipment storage and most of them are lucky enough that somebody planned for that, left enough ring around it, to expand a little bit. And I got the third kind farm I usually-Or maybe it’s my 4th and I’m keeping track of my list here. To move your bigger free stall barns and so these farms are milking and really important on how you layout the pins and where you place the buildings in relation to the parlor for the cow barns you want. You want it to be efficient. An efficient way to move the cows from their pin to the parlor and then back to their pin. Without impeding your progress so that you can get everyone milked as quickly as possible. But also, you know most dairy farmers raise their calves from when they’re little bitty to when their heifers.
And then when they enter the milking herd, so you have to think about placement of these-for lack of a better word-stations. So that as they grow. You’re not having to ship them all the way across the farm.
You can just take them slowly to the next step, hopefully just by opening a couple of gates to move into.
The next barn or pan or however, that farm is set up. So hopefully that’s a good introduction to kind of what I’m looking at here.
00:13:37 Hollywood
Yeah it does and it kind of brings up my next point. I guess my next question so you’re talking about- and you’ve already kind of covered this, I guess talking about like having to get the cows through their life and laying out the farm according to like each station as you were calling it. Which reminds me a lot of those little. Grade school science fairs where you like stop at each one- I don’t know if this is an international thing as well as just an American thing, but we used to do like little science fairs in like the first-grade elementary school which is like about your like 5- to 12-year-old kids and they used to like to stop at each station in each little area was like a different project. I’m kind of imagining the cow’s kind of going through this right now. Would the product being produced per farm change the layout?
So, if you were focused more on your fresh produce and I think in one of the other recordings we spent a really long time talking about this about like, that each farm has to produce so much of their own due to like sustainability. From their own crops, being their only feed and things like that. Did you want to like touch on that real quick Rach?
00:14:54 Racheal
Of course, the kind of farm I’m most familiar with the cattle of were of Jersey origins, but Your farm layout could change drastically if you were a row crop farmer. You know farming cotton corn, soybeans.
There’s a whole list I could name, and I could never name them all. But then they would need a lot of storage and sheds for their combines and things. But then if I move kind of back towards beef farmers, they most of them grow their own hay. Quite a number of them will grow some of their own grain to reduce their own feed bills and to get their cows through the winter, or some of them supplement year-round. Your dairy farmers do the same thing, they grow cotton, not cotton-corn and soybeans. Uhm, make their own silage from the corn to feed their cows year-round. Because nobody wants to buy all that in. It gets very expensive very quickly, and suddenly your margins-your profit margins on that farm are next to nothing to begin with-they’d be nonexistent if you had to buy all the feed.
00:16:28 Hollywood
OK, so when we’re taught in design school to view this, we’re really kind of taught. OK, if you research it. This animal needs x amount of area. Regardless of if you’re doing metric system or American system or whatever you’re doing and then it needs X amount of food and everything like that, would you say that that’s roughly what farmers are doing as well?
00:16:58 Racheal
We’re just kind of framing it in a different way-or template so to speak. You have to know how many animals you need to support and then how much land you need to farm. You know to feed them year-round. So yeah, and I’d say there’s a formula out there you know they. It depends on what kind of ration they’re feeding, but there’s a science behind it.
00:17:22 Hollywood
And you heard it here first folks, listen to your teachers. They know what they’re talking about, design students.
00:17:28 Racheal
That’s right.
00:17:33 Hollywood
But is there a certain distance you’ve noticed from city life or two suburbs and city life that you feel like really works or doesn’t? I felt like this was a really good topic for us the other day, and something that we often come to and argue about. Uhm, so once I was in school with Rachel and she needed to go check a cow for her class that she did get an A on. So, I’m very glad we went. But I went out with her to the farm in five-inch heels because I did not realize at first until we were in the car, that that’s where we were going, and we went traipsing through the field looking for baby cows after birth.
00:18:18 Racheal
Hey, you had fun.
00:18:20 Hollywood
I did. But it does make me wonder, is there a certain distance to city life or to the suburbs in the suburban areas that works best that you’ve noticed?
00:18:35 Racheal
Oh, that’s a hard one, and it depends a lot on the people I suppose. You hear, you may not hear about it every day, but you hear it fairly often. That you’ll find, uh, a farmer, that doesn’t sell out the city kind of grows up around his farm. It happens. Personal preference, I would prefer my farm to be a little bit outside the suburbs. Because it makes it safer for me as a producer to move from location to location. I think so. There’s fewer chances of accidents or heaven forbid; my animals get out. And I have to chase them. I’m not chasing them down the Interstate. And as far as neighbors, I’m sure neighbors to some of these farms will prefer to at least be upwind from them. But having farms close to suburbs or the city. It definitely gives people that wouldn’t normally interact with them. Wouldn’t normally be on a farm a chance to at least see them see that they’re there soon, where the animals are. Even if it’s just driving by like oh, look, the cows are on the pasture again. Oh, they look happy. Whether people realize it or not, that’s like good interaction they can have with agriculture. That can have a lasting effect.
00:20:16 Hollywood
Yeah, I think. You definitely know about this that I used to volunteer at a zoo and used to volunteer to farm before that. I did actually. I know I sounded like I’d never been on a farm going to a farm in my 5 inch heels-that was just a bad day I guess, but the thing that I always took away from it was just kind of this general enjoyment and this is probably not going to be true internationally where you have communities that are a lot closer, you kind of have a little bit more of a divide in the urban environment to the rural, like there’s a slightly larger gradient. It’s not really like up close, where even in America, like the East Coast, is slightly more jam packed full of people. In the middle slowly, there’s not as many people and then you have again another like concentrated development on the other side of the east, the Rocky Mountains. I don’t know why I was going to say the East Appalachian, that is totally wrong side of the country. I do know my geography, I swear. But, and part of that has to do with the Dust Bowl of American history when we kind of. Over produced in the middle of the [country], then the depression happened the Dust Bowl, which was like literal dust moving up and then the destruction of multiple farms and things. But all that to say, when I was volunteering, one of the things that like I felt impacted me the most was this idea of people who had never seen a cow before in their like entire life. They had never interacted with it. It was something only on TV, only on like movies, you know something that they saw in their Westerns and that was about it and it was amazing to watch them get to like meet a cow for the first time like and not in a contradictory way. Like genuinely like I mean. It was so amazing for me. I swear I cried a couple times. There’s nothing like pure joy on their face of like meeting the animal and getting into like, you know, understand the process of food to table. I mean, I think that was a wasn’t that a like promotion for a while there like food table? Something like that. Dine local.
00:22:29 Racheal
They’re still pretty popular, yeah?
00:22:32 Hollywood
I haven’t seen it online as much, or maybe I just stopped watching TV when I joined grad school. I don’t know which the-
00:22:39 Racheal
Truth is, I did.
And that’s one of my favorite things is getting to introduce people to agriculture and animals. When I was in school we did a lot of extension events. That were similar, we would have school kids come out and meet the cows, but. I think I was telling you about my friend, Emily, the other day. Now Emily grew up in Chicago and she moved I don’t know. Maybe in like middle school outside Milano, where I grew up. And she had never met a cow, had never met a horse. And the whole concept of that had just blown my mind. There’s never been a day where I didn’t know where my milk came from or you know, like the cows in my grandparent’s farm like they had names and so it just blew my mind. And I took great pride in as I called it introducing her to agriculture, she would probably tell me that I was torturing her.
But it’s OK. She got introduced to some new ideas. I put her on a horse for the first time and that kind of stuff and I am proud to say that she when she did eventually move back to Chicago. She now has good stories to tell and like tells people how excited she is to go see the cows or horses. Anyway, I find that very, very interesting. I wish they had more opportunities where she grew up to interact with farms.
00:24:27 Hollywood
Yeah, I think we were talking about how we would really be for the idea of designing like instead of the nature overpasses do, like farmer overpasses. So that way they could like farm in little strips above the Interstate, or like, pass their tractors safely over the Interstate. Or move their cows safely over the Interstate without having to like you know cross the literal Interstate. But it’s-
00:24:57 Racheal
That would be nice.
00:24:58 Hollywood
Is there any sort of weird designs or weird things you’ve come across on farming that made you question?
00:25:09 Racheal
Well, you’re always going to find a couple of things that that make you think that, uhm? 01 of the things that just comes right off the top of my head is a lot of the barns I I’m in band and day out right. The minute are older. They were built before we had the automatic milking clause. Right, that kind of milks the cow for you. They were these barns were built when you milked all your cows by hand. And so one of the things. One of the improvements that came with the automatic milkers right is you have to get the milk from the cow from the milker into your bulk tank that holds all the milk so the milk truck can come get it. And those have to kind of head downhill. They may get a little bit low ’cause the ceiling doesn’t start out high enough in a lot of these barns. And if you’re not careful, you’ll walk right into them and I had spent several days with a headache all day ’cause I ran. Face first into a pipe that was a little lower than I expected. So I kind of wonder why we can’t find a better way to do that? Sometimes, but it’s OK, gotta do what you gotta do.
00:26:30 Hollywood
Concession proof designs.
00:26:30 Racheal
A lot of timeline-
Right, right?
But the guy that built the barn didn’t foresee him needing to build the ceiling any higher, right? Along those same lines, I often wonder about the placement of the milk house. And some of these barns, and I guess. I should tell you; do you know what a milk house is Hollywood?
00:26:53 Hollywood
I do, but for our listeners you should probably drop a line just in case they don’t know what it is.
00:26:58 Racheal
OK, well milk house is a room that houses the bulk tank where all the milk is stored and kept cool there’s-it’s a very cleanroom that that’s where you keep the milk, equipment and generally has a sink, but that room is inspected by the milk inspector and kept very clean. But it has to be placed in such a spot that the milk truck can essentially, back up to the door. Uhm, so they can get their hose then to get.
The milk out of the bulk tank. And so sometimes those know cows are placed in a very good spot, and sometimes they’re just kind of in a corner out of the way because. It’s the only place they could put it where the milk truck could get into some of the older farms.
00:27:49 Hollywood
Oh, and you have a really cool barn you were telling me about yesterday-about like he switched the way the cows were.
00:27:58 Racheal
I did I remember telling you about that. Well so this is a guy that had to make his barn work for him. And so his barn was very atypical. This gentleman was in a wheelchair. And I. I don’t know if he had always been in a wheelchair or if there was some kind of accident I don’t recall. But he actually had a traditional tie stall barn. That I hadn’t upstairs to it, and he had an elevator put in his barn and made an apartment for himself upstairs. But downstairs is where the cows were and instead of having a traditional tie stall barn where the cows face outward. And then behind them and then between the two rows of cows. It would be an alleyway normally where you would milk from behind their rear legs or from the side, but.
Instead of that, he had his cows’ facing inwards. So, the feed alley was in the center of the barn. And had his barn special fitted with tracks and a feed cart that sat in those tracks and the tracks went from his silo. On the other side of the barn and went all the way down the feed alley. And then so he just had to push the cart in a straight line and then could push it straight back. To the silo to reload, instead of having to push it like all the way around the barn-that wouldn’t have worked too well. And I thought that was that was very interesting. He, I’m sure, had plenty of help making that happen, but he had to make the farm work for him, right?
00:29:58 Hollywood
No, that’s definitely a good innovation. Like thinking through the short, the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line, and this definitely proves that. And that’s really cool that he adapted the technology to him, and I guess that really kind of brings me to my next thing. We talked kind of about it. You were talking about like the gates reading the ear tags and stuff. And I was reading up on smart technology after we tried to record yesterday. And like smart farming, which of course leads you to like vertical farming and like green walls and things that I myself have guilty of putting a green wall in several of my design projects for but what technology have you noticed that has helped out with the farming life?
00:30:49 Racheal
Oh my goodness, they use technology everywhere. Everywhere these days, uhm? So I guess they.
Everybody listening didn’t get to hear my tale about the sort gates yesterday, so I’ll retell it briefly. And a lot of these barns when the cows leave the milking parlor, they go through a return alley to go back to the pen that they normally live in. And most of these cows are an ID tag on their ear or on their collar.
That the, uh, a special reader, can read them. I can tell the computer to say OK, cow 409 needs to be sorted now, maybe I need to sort her to dry or off, maybe I need to give her medicine or have her breed or do something but-
00:31:55 Hollywood
or pets.
00:31:56 Racheal
I guess I guess we can give her pets.
But the gate will close and open another gate to put her in a special pin so that I can find her easily later to either move her or do whatever I need to do. And that’s very helpful. It saves on labor. It saves on stress. For the cows. I don’t have to go sort through a pan of 100 cows just to find 1. To chase her up or something. I mentioned the callers that they wear a lot of those collars and even the ID tags can monitor the cows activity. It can tell me depending on what kind of tag and what kind of system it is, can tell me if she’s walking more than normal. Which could indicate that she is in heat and needs to be bred.
They can tell me there’s several of these systems that are out now that will give a warning that she’s moving less than she normally does. That could indicate that somebody needs to go lay eyes on her.
She might be sick. She might be, you know, she may have a hurt foot or. Something so it alerts the farmer to go to go find that cow and make sure she’s OK. They can there’s a system out that just came out, oh gosh, maybe the first of the year. But it allows me to locate a cow within the barn. If I load uh like a schematic of my barn into the computer. It tells me down to what stalled she is in, like what bed she’s laying in.
00:33:42 Hollywood
Big Brother is watching, and he likes your cows.
00:33:45 Racheal
Oh yeah, and those systems are really fun when the cows get out ’cause you can see her dot just like leaving the barn and off it goes. Although ever everyone hopes that never happens. But it does so.
00:34:02 Hollywood
I mean, I have. I think I told the story yesterday about my mom, but nobody like I said we’re kind of confusing ourselves with what we actually said yesterday versus what we said today, which is probably why you don’t record multiple times, but it’s a learning experience period, it’s OK. But my mom was a kid she was going to school, and during the usual like you know, I think she must have been like 8 or something is what she said. So, she was throwing like the usual little kid temper tantrum. She might have been older- I don’t know. But [the whole] like I don’t want to go to school. I don’t want to go to school and her mom-My grandma-was like you got to go to school. And then my mom opened the door for you to go outside and goes. “Mom, I can’t go to school-There’s a bull on the front yard” with like absolute Glee because she can’t go to school and my grandmother is like no, no. There’s definitely not.
And turns out that a farm that existed like a couple like plots over a had a bull that got out and was apparently just eating the dandelions on my grandparents’ yard having a grand old time with life, which I guess kind of brought me to my next point Like my family loves animals. But we’re not going to go like pet a strange one that we don’t have permission to pet, but it kind of made me wonder like. Animals and with the like distance to city life in the suburbs and the suburban areas. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had like mini farms designed in such a way like they’re like put into the city? Kind of the reverse of the standard version of the current city. So instead of being like centered around your like. Place of you know business, your like leadership etc., it would be like positioned around your farm like a complete inverse of ideals. While I’m like preaching anarchy here-the thing that I was talking about yesterday also was this idea of people like escaping to the city like the from the city life to the Country Life and we kind of spoke about this yesterday and I accidentally said it was. One person who I’m not going to say the same name, but I was actually thinking of Hadrian village or Villa. Sorry, not village.
I mean he was emperor so he owned a village, but Hadrian Villa is what I was thinking of which is like one of like the surviving quintessential you know remains of an escapism from city life into this simpler times where you’re kind of like playing house like Maria Antoinette, did reportedly like her little house or Playhouse. She, like armed quote, unquote because I keep forgetting this is not a physical-You can’t see me so. So, what is that kind of like? Look like I guess, would there be a way to blend it in through design that you could blend these ideas better? Or would there? Is there a solution to that or is it kind of a play by ear? See what happens.
00:37:17 Racheal
Well, I think. I think there’s a couple different ways we can kind of look at this. As far as making the farm the center of like the city or the community. Maybe, maybe if you had more of a. A small farm like a petting zoo or something that didn’t require a lot of land, maybe, maybe, but what would be the limiting factor is who can afford to buy land in the middle of the city to farm on? It’s expensive. I think it would be good for people. To get that kind of experience in their daily lives again, hopefully, hopefully we would get cut down on the number of kids who think their milk comes from the grocery store. Or I think that they are.
00:38:14 Hollywood
Her pet peeves #1
00:38:17 Racheal
Do what?
00:38:19 Hollywood
Rachel’s pet peeve #1
00:38:21 Racheal
Racheal’s pet peeve number 1. That’s right. Red cows do not make strawberry milk. Let’s just get that fixed right now. OK. Black cows do not make chocolate milk. No, your mom probably told you that-she was lying not to call your mom a liar.
But you were talking about maybe people visiting farms or like that’s almost what I would call like tourism or farm tourism almost. You do see some of that. People go to dude ranches. To see how our ranch runs. Or get a chance to ride a horse or what have you. You see the same thing in some communities that have lots of small farms. You’ll see they’ll give tours of the farms. So, people can from the outside can come in and see how some of these farmers live day to day. And how they raise their animals, and I think that’s very valuable. Right ’cause I think it’s very important that people see that we don’t mistreat our animals and there’s a reason for our buildings, right? There’s a reason I have 5 silos outside ’cause I need them. And a lot of these, farmstays, I know several people that have like an airBNB. And part of the stay is to help feed the calves or gets to help milk a cow. You know, however, often you want while you stay there. I think it’s a unique way to show off the farm I know several people that they run their farm-not necessarily airbnb, but they run it daily tours through, and they show people how to care for different animals. I’m trying to think: the farm in particular I’m thinking of has turkeys and chickens, ducks, mini pigs. Mini goats, I think they probably have full sized versions of both of those cows and ponies and horses and dogs. They have everything you could ever dream of on a farm, so it’s a lot of stuff that people don’t get to see at one time. Very often-Did I go off on a tangent?
00:41:08 Hollywood
No, you didn’t, just go off on a tangent.
Or if you did, I liked it so it’s fine, but I’m going to say goat yoga man, that’s what we need to market it.
00:41:18 Racheal
Well, they do that here. I know people that do that.
00:41:22 Hollywood
B OK, so if we were going to design A farm, if you and I were going to sit down and be like OK, this is the points that we think is important to list in a design? Would you say that we need more than one silo?
Uhm, more one barn for the animals, whatever they are, whether it’s our yoga goats or our multiple cows. Uhm, would you say that you would need an extra like maybe not a full barn, but an extra like cool shed workshop separate from the barn? OK, and then the house and that would be you think the bare minimum.
00:42:11 Racheal
Oh yeah.
00:42:11 Hollywood
Over if it was just you me and one other person?
00:42:15 Racheal
Yeah, at the very least you need a house, to live in. A tool shed, to keep all your tools. Maybe an equipment shed depending on if you have any large equipment and then then a spot for your animals.
So that’s a minimum of three or four buildings at least. And, uh, well, I guess. You need feed storage, but we talked about silos and to be clear, there are several different kinds of ways to do that.
They have bunk silos.Now that instead of being like the tall skinny ones. It’s like kind of like they made a hole dug in the ground. Uhm, like a big box.That they cover with plastic. So the farmers or people even use AG bags, which is like A long skinny tube that they pack with whatever it is that they’re storing
00:43:10 Hollywood
If you had to give advice to a design student like their freshman year, they’re first learning about design tactics, and they’re doing multiple mini projects. What would be some of the priorities or some of the like rituals of the farmer that they would need to keep in mind? And for our non-designer just to quickly explain what I mean by rituals. I am not encouraging cults or anything like that. Please don’t-
00:43:37 Racheal
Join the farm cult.
00:43:40 Hollywood
But what I’m saying is in architecture school, or at least in my school, we are pretty interested in or several professors are really interested in how a person utilizes the space, like in their day-to-day life, like whether it’s like they always get up and brush their teeth and go here and go here afterwards and like or like me they like get up, brush your teeth, do some yoga, do some workouts, etc. And for us, like it, kind of if we frame it within like the ritual of the space, like this is the intention of the space. This is how we use it. This is the way we use. It this is kind of the progression. That’s like an interesting sidetrack for us. So, if you were to lay label like what’s the interest or the ritual of the farmer?
Any design student we need to consider when they’re like first approaching this.
00:44:35 Racheal
Oh gosh, first approaching it. Oh gosh.
00:44:37 Hollywood
Yeah, like they know nothing.
00:44:38 Racheal
The very first thing you should stop and go and ask yourself is what does the land look like? Right, you don’t want to put your house or your barn or whatever somewhere it’s going to flood when it rains. Right, you don’t want all the water on everything to drain right into your farm.
You don’t want you OK if you build up north where it snows a lot. In the wintertime you need some place to put all the snow to get your driveways clear. Right? So you’ve got to remember to leave some room for that. And I could be going in a completely wrong direction, but I think I think these are important things should…[temporary technical difficulties].. I’d buy as farmers as far as runoff. And there are laws that apply to them in your storage and stuff, and so you need to be up to date on those. Before you place anything, anywhere permanent. But then moving to like the farmers rituals. On a lot of these smaller family farms and even the big ones the farmer doesn’t live far from it. It’s special in there. But they have to have somebody milk them and take care of them every day, but you, the farmer walks more than 100 feet- I’m not very good at distances. The soft bar in the middle of winter I could make it from the house to the barn. Thought a code, you know, does that make sense? Kind of. Uhm, so he needs to be close, but you have to think about what he needs. And I should probably quit saying he not all farmers are men before I get myself into trouble. But what does that farmer need? He might need a little office, a small nook somewhere to keep his records. A breeding’s or treatment need a medicine room. With labeled shelves and possibly a refrigerator and places to store any kind of equipment he may need for applying drugs. You know, needles, syringes. Uh, an ear tab?
00:47:26 Hollywood
So, it sounds like a pretty long list of different ideas that are pretty basic to it, like there’s more to the design. So, like there’s a lot more to the design, it sounds like the art that we need to consider as designers beyond just all they move through the space.
00:47:47 Racheal
Right, and I think I think. It would be a very big challenge for you to design something that was very functional without having Eh, experienced it or being it to sit down and talk to whoever is going to be using it.
00:48:02 Hollywood
OK, see you guys.
00:48:05 Racheal
Continue, you’re fine.
00:48:05 Hollywood
Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I was just going to say so: you’re saying that client relations is very important and like getting to know who you’re designing for.
00:48:16 Racheal
’cause everybody has their preferences. I’m not and all the barns I go to-No two are the same. This guy’s medicine room and his office or the same thing. Sometimes they’re completely different. Sometimes there’s neither one of them at all, cause he keeps all his drugs in the house or something. Or I don’t know, maybe they’re in the cabinet I haven’t found yet I. Don’t but. It just depends on what he needs it for maybe. Some of the farmers I know also have. A horse barn attached to the cow barn so that changes things drastically as far as layout. So it’d be very challenging, but I think that building a farm.
Ends up being a lot like a lot of people that build their own houses. You know somebody that builds their house new, if you go back and ask them. You know 10 years down the road. Is this a perfect house with is there anything? You would change about it. What are most people gonna say. I would think most of them are going to find one or two things they would do differently. So, I don’t know. That’s my take on it anyway.
00:49:37 Hollywood
Hindsight is 2020. I guess this will kind of be our last question. Have you noticed any distinction between self-directed slash design farms and a quote designer farm?
00:49:57 Racheal
Differences in layout or?
00:50:02 Hollywood
Yes, sorry that did sound very late by trying to trap you in the question, I meant it more like.
Is there have you noticed? Uhm, with the self-designed farms versus like a designer like somebody,
Outside of there in a firm designing the farm, do you notice anything like regarding either the layout or the functionality? Like is there a certain level of personalization that? Doing it yourself, designing it by yourself allows you a certain freedom versus the designer far more. Have you noticed anything like that?
This is more of like a pro and a con list, not a like Offer criticism and piss off your client’s question.
00:50:57 Racheal
Well, I think everything has its pros and cons, but I as far as what I look at every day. You know, I can usually tell. Uhm, when someone’s farm has been professionally designed and a lot of times. I can tell that by ease of access and ease of moving cows, right? So, somebody really sat down and thought that out where they need to put their gates and where the pens are. It can make a huge difference in how hard my life is getting from A to B or moving a cow from wherever.
00:51:32 Hollywood
OK, so it sounds like it wouldn’t- That’s not even a fair question that I ask. It’s more of a what was the intention when designing would be a better way to say it. So like was this? Like the tradition like this is how they’ve traditionally done it for years, versus somebody who focused on the needs of the space in the design.
00:51:54 Racheal
I yeah I guess, you could say that. You know the thing about designing it yourself is that you can for the year. You can see you know far enough in the future to be like I’m going to leave that spot right there. ’cause I think this is what we’re going to do when I get the money. To do it or you know get more cows to do it and you just leave it alone. And farmers are notorious for making things work OK. For example, My grandfather, Is notorious for her fix in fences? Sometimes we did not have all the tools available at the time, but the fence needed to be fixed or the cows would get out and this is a little off track. But we knew ways to make it look like the fence was put together enough to take the cows out for a little while.
And so sometimes that’s what you have to do is you make it work for now with the intent of perfecting.
It maybe 10 years down the road and I think a lot of times when you design it yourself, that’s what you have in mind. Where sometimes a firm or something was involved. It looks a little different, maybe a little more finished even with expansion in mind later If that makes sense.
00:53:20 Hollywood
Yeah no, that makes sense. I mean, innovation is the mother of necessities though.
00:53:26 Racheal
That’s right.
00:53:27 Hollywood
Or is it reversed? I can’t quite remember, but.
00:53:29 Racheal
Necessity is the-
00:53:31 Hollywood
-Is the mother of innovation, you’re right I totally, just like inverted that.
00:53:36 Racheal
Well, I got the gist of it.
00:53:40 Hollywood
But Uhm, is there anything that you were wanting like add that we didn’t get to cover that we covered in one of our multiple recordings that you felt that we needed to bring up today before we like close off.
Giving you the opportunity to correct me.
00:53:59 Racheal
If I missed any cool stories, ’cause I don’t want to deprive anybody, but I think we hit all the high points.
This might be a good opportunity for me to just go ahead and tell everybody that I’m no expert and I haven’t been everywhere in Seeing a free farm and they are all very different.
00:54:18 Hollywood
Well, like I told everybody in my first episode, you know- check your sources, check your facts, and more importantly check me. So, if we said anything that you don’t agree with or anything that you have a unique insight on. Please don’t hesitate to reach out and let me know. I really want to hear from you.
I want to hear from the non-designers of the world, but otherwise, thank you so much for joining me today Rachel, and a huge thank you to all of my listeners that I’m really surprised I actually have.
If you want to either be featured or have a case study, suggestion, or perhaps you just want to share a fit story of your favorite designer experience in the landscape you can find me at either architect architecture, coffee and ink. The website is architectureink.design.blog if you want to reach out to me directly my twitter is at Hollywood Conrad, which like I said before, pretty much hasn’t changed just now got 3 whole tweets I’m very proud of it now. Everything will be listed as normal in the show notes, including my incredibly long URL. There is currently a contact form on the finished home page of the website so you can also just email me directly. Just make sure that’s architecturecoffeeandink@gmail.com all spelt out without the ampersands so. And is literally just A-N-D, no spaces. My theme song is once again by me in GarageBand, so thank you once again for getting through it. And the other music in this episode is also going to be from me in garage band because I got cocky and thought that I could keep going. I got really excited when I was playing around with it, and as always everything is credited along with the sources on the blog. Although since this is an interview episode instead of a normal case study episode, there’s really not going to be that many sources today.
Uhm, but as always, please, please support your local artist and try something new, and as always,
may your coffee mugs be full, and your inkwells never run dry.
Thank you.
Have a great day.
